Business Development Lead
About Eat Cook Joy
Eat Cook Joy is building the world's first food copilot, powered by a foundational model trained for food. The model learns from how people actually plan, cook, and eat, and connects them with affordable, professional cooking help. In the process, we're proving that AI can create jobs, not just replace them, by putting more private chefs to work.
We are a small, high-velocity team operating across SF and Stockholm. This is a foundational hire.
Early Traction (Pilot)
- 20,000+ personalized menus generated and 75,000+ meals delivered
- 26 professional chefs feeding expertise into the model, with a 500+ chef waitlist
- 92% 30-day retention in pilot, with engagement growing double digits month over month
The Role
This is a rare seat for someone early in their career who wants to learn how a company actually gets built, by doing it, next to the founder.
You will work directly alongside the CEO across the business: revenue, partnerships, operations, and strategy. You won't be handed a narrow lane. You'll be handed real problems, coached hard, and expected to run at them. Over time, you'll grow into owning meaningful pieces of the business yourself.
This is not a support role. It's an apprenticeship in operating, for someone with the horsepower and hunger to make the most of it.
What You'll Do
- Chase down revenue and partnership opportunities: source them, structure them, and help close them
- Own real problems end to end, from messy and ambiguous to shipped
- Build the operating scaffolding of the company: how we plan, decide, and measure progress
- Prepare the founder for high-stakes moments (board, investors, partners) and sit in the room to learn how they're handled
- Spot what's falling through the cracks and fix it before it becomes a problem
- Learn the craft of operating a company, directly from the founder, and grow into owning more
What We're Looking For
- Recent MBA or early-career, with the ambition to become a serious operator
- Evidence you've built, sold, or closed something no one told you to. We care about drive, not pedigree
- Scrappy, resourceful, and comfortable in ambiguity
- Sharp judgment and fast learning; you take coaching and compound on it
- Direct and candid, willing to disagree and to commit
- Excellent written and verbal communication, and the discretion to handle sensitive information
- Hungry to prove yourself, and honest about what you don't yet know
Who You'll Work With
Zainab Ghadiyali, Founder & CEO. Zainab is a technical founder with deep product experience. At Facebook, she was Tech Lead on the early Ads Growth team, launching products that 4x'd Facebook's advertiser growth. On the side, she conceptualized and built Facebook's first healthcare product, Blood Donations, driving 30M new registered donors at launch. She later led Product Infrastructure at Canva. Foreign Policy named her among the Top 100 Global Thinkers for her work in tech. This is a chance to learn the craft directly from her.
What Success Looks Like
You start by executing well on what's put in front of you, and you earn ownership fast. Within a year, you're running real pieces of the business, measured by tangible outcomes: revenue, partnerships, and the KPIs behind them.
Compensation
- Base: $120,000 – $150,000
- Equity: Meaningful early-stage equity (4-year vest, 1-year cliff)
- The real upside: front-row access and direct coaching from the founder as you grow into an operator
How to Apply
No resumes. No lengthy forms. Two prompts, and the second one is where most people lose us:
- Tell us (half a page, or a 2-minute Loom) about a time you built, sold, or fixed something no one asked you to. What did you do, what happened, and what did you learn?
- Spend 30 minutes with Eat Cook Joy app.eatcookjoy.com. Then tell us: the one thing you would cut entirely, the one thing you would fix first, and what you would ship in your first two weeks that would prove you were the right hire. Be specific. "Improve onboarding" is a pass; "the third screen asks a question the copilot should already know the answer to, here's how I'd remove it" is a conversation.
Send both to contact@eatcookjoy.com, and cc support@eatcookjoy.com . If it lands, we'll get on a call within 24 hours and you'll have two specific times to choose from. We read everything, and we reply to the specific ones first.